Sean Penn’s last film as a director “pretty much got him booed off the red carpet” at Cannes, but on the basis of Flag Day, in which he also stars, he has clearly “still got it”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. In this “very watchable and well-made family drama”, he plays the real-life swindler John Vogel, who was pursued by the FBI in the 1990s for forging $100 bills on an industrial scale. Penn exudes a “buzzard-like watchfulness” as the sociopathic Vogel; his “seductive address to the camera is almost unrivalled”. As a director, too, “he knows how to bring the horsepower”. The film is based on a memoir by Vogel’s daughter, Jennifer (played by Dylan Penn, Sean Penn’s daughter with Robin Wright), a journalist who must come to terms with her father’s ceaseless lies. “There are some pretty broad emotional strokes here”, but the film made “with some style”.
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